Reality bites: Is your confidence misplaced?

By Martin Boyd, Division Executive, Institutional & Wholesale

Do you feel more confident about your growth prospects than you did last year?

If you said yes, then you’re not alone. When we surveyed more than 1,500 decision makers across the buy side, sell side and insurance for the 2018 FIS™ Readiness Report, we discovered that 47 percent of firms believe their operations function is strong enough to fully support their growth ambitions, and 41 percent said the same about their technology. Compare that to last year’s findings: only 28 percent felt their operations were fit for growth, and 25 percent said the same about their technology. That’s a huge increase in confidence.

On the face of it, the optimism makes sense. The economic and industry outlook is more positive, and the pace of regulatory change seems to have slowed, at least for now.

Moreover, when we scored our respondents against six key pillars of growth, we discovered that in many areas, the industry is performing better; it’s even narrowing the gap with the top 20 percent of scorers: the Readiness Leaders. Yet the Readiness Leaders continue to grow nearly twice as fast as the rest of the industry.

How do you reconcile these findings?

Well, the industry is catching up when it comes to operational foundations such as data management and automation. But they’re still behind on the more complicated areas, such as advanced automation, emerging technology and digital innovation strategy - the actions that companies are taking to accelerate the adoption and application of new digital technologies. And those are the pillars with the greatest correlation to growth.

So should firms simply switch their attention to those areas? Not so fast. Our research shows that those operational foundations must be in place before you can successfully embrace robotics, for example. But once they’re in place, firms can evolve from a tactical focus on efficiency to a modernized operating model that can accelerate growth and improve your value to clients.